Chris Webb has a final round up of some views on this new project that was announced at the BI conference. I particularly like this quote:

"Where is the single version of the truth in this architecture? I’ve just spent 4 years of my life trying to convince users to stop using Excel as a data store and here are Microsoft positively encouraging it. Hell will freeze over before this capability is used responsibly in most organisations".

I have little to add but I do think it is highlighting a view that I came across frequently when working in the Microsoft BI space namely that the development of BI at Microsoft is becoming more and more detached from real world deployment.

This view first came to my attention in the fiasco that was the SQL 2005 SP1 to SP2 transition. At first I dismissed this but the more I wrestled with the quirks the more I wondered.

I now wonder if this is another example of the left hand not getting what the right hand is doing, much like the gaps between the work the Excel team do and the SQL team do.

I picked up this post from the SQLTeam site.

It links to details on how SQL Server is being supported in Virtual Environments.

It would seem that if your configuration is SVVP Certified then you will get a better response but Microsoft seem to be very worried, quite rightly, that supporting in a virtual environment adds a whole new layer of complexity.

This is especially true for performance, but that’s another rant.

With thanks to Yuri who pointed me in the direction of Craig who has pointers to a whole range of materials around the performance management shake up that is going on.

Craig has a short piece on Performance Management 2.0 which he describes as an outgrowth of the core performance management that many companies have in place.

The 2.0 tag will become truer as the Microsoft PerformancePoint impact becomes clearer. In Craig’s words;

The area with the greatest potential payback is operational analytics. This really brings performance management to all areas of the company and makes it meaningful and relevant to each of those areas.

The emphasis is mine but I think that it shows how the Microsoft mentality of "pile them high sell them cheap" and get the information in front of those that can act on it will drive the market going forward. 

It is also interesting to see how the likes of Business Objects are starting to align their portfolio of products to ensure that they maintain the same level of coverage as Microsoft are expected to offer.

Thanks to Brian and others for pointing out a set of links to white papers and articles on reporting services.

I will be interested to read the one on localization and performance monitoring. I like the fact that in reporting services it is possible to track each stage of a reports execution performance from the ExecutionLog table.

Thinking this on a bit whilst walking to the station I was considering how good it would be if the upcoming PerformancePoint product included by default a set of performance monitoring models (cubes) and KPIs for its own operations. It would be a great differentiator and would appeal to the IT decision makers involved in making the product choice. Even better if the PerformancePoint team could talk to the MOM and server teams to produce a set of IT models.

Way back at the Microsoft Partner Conference I saw a short demo of RSInteract. This is a totally web based report building tool that sits over SQL Server Reporting Services (2000/5)  and I was impressed.

Today I had a web demo of it again including the new OLAP report building in the new release. As always in a demo there is a lot to take in but some of the things I really liked were:

• It is very light weight being a pure web app.
• The ability to edit an existing report is very easy.
• The user can preview the changes without having to commit them.
• Multiple combinations of tables and graphs can be built into one report. This is a really nice feature.
• The functionality and UI has been broken up in a nice easy to understand manner.
• None of the underlying Reporting Services power and functionality has been lost. It is just made easier.

The down sides to this silver bullet of report writing are:

• It does not use the report models for relational data sources. You have to create and expose views for the end user.
• there is an additional cost over and above SQL Server Licences. That said when compared to other ad-hoc report builders in the market it is still cheap with what appears to be much greater functionality.

I have just installed it and will be evaluating it myself over the coming week so more later.

Does anyone have any experiance with this product or something similar for comparison?

I have been fighting a strange bug in an Integration I have got between Oracle 9i running on a Solaris box and SQL Server 2005.

• Within the dev environment the SSIS imports run just fine.
• When packaged and deployed to SQL Server they run just fine.
• When run from SQL Server Agent scheduled they run just fine.
• When run from SQL Server Agent scheduled and no one is interactivly  logged in to Windows on to the SQL box the import fails with an unspecified error.

The SQL Agent is running as a domain account with network access to the Oracle Box the job is set to run using that account and when I log in (allowing the job to run) I am logging is as a NON domain account!

It seems really weird but this post was triggered by reading this post by Jamie. Maybe, just Maybe!

Ian Tien points out that Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 will have the usual Microsoft snappy title and will be released Summer 2007.

I have not fully explored the links as the connection I am on is Very slow.

If you are after a closer view of some screen shots I see that the source presentation from the announcement is now available. I think that the screens on the Biz# management console dont do it justice.

Picked up this useful tit bit

Those who are trying to integrate Ax 3.0 clients with BizTalk Server 2006 and Analysis Server 2005, please note that at the time of writing this may not be possible.

Particularly with Analysis Server 2005 (AS 2005), the problem seems to stem from the fact that whereas by default AS 2006 has moved away from DSO (Decision Support Objects), Ax 3.0 is basically a DSO enabled program. Though (to some extent) Ax 3.0 is able to speak to AS 2005 using the backward compatibility feature of AS, subsequently when you try to view the cube inside Ax 3.0 it falls through.

As Touchstone do a fair bit of Axapta work this could have bitten us.

This blog here has a posting speculating that there is to be a Microsoft BI conference in the Summer. Unfortunately there is no supporting evidence of this. I would love it to be true and hope that there is sufficient notice so I can start pestering my boss!

Well day three is over and I did get a lot out of it.

The PerformancePoint bits were great to see and I am looking forward to getting my hands on it. However, I do think that having seen the current gulf between the MS components and the ProClarity ones in terms of integration that the team will have their work cut out.

The Business Scorecard Manager day was a good refresh from the training course I did on it. It is a nice tool but I still think the Builder app could do with a lot of usability studies. It seems a bit disjointed at the moment. I am assured that the V2 product is much tidier.

I really enjoyed getting into Proclarity. I had always meant to get it installed and have a go but never did. I now consider it a must have. Even if it is just as a powerful cube browser and MDX generator. I shall certainly be including it in my demo stack.

It was also nice that there was a 2 way dialogue and Ryan Buma ( Microsoft’s director of business development for Office business applications) seemed to take onboard some of the points that were made. Namely:

• Microsoft need to get the BSM, Proclarity, PerformancePoint, Excel, Sharepoint, Visio and SQL Server teams locked together in a padded room with a senior exec who should be armed with a large LART. They should then decide and CLEARLY state what the message is on KPIs. There is way too much confusion about what tools fit where.
• When the teams are allowed out they should then be locked up with the Dynamics teams. It is the Dynamics product lines that will be driving the lions share of sales of the MS BI products. So get it together and make it work together. This will be even more imperative when PerformancePoint comes out. In fairness Ryan did say they were working on it but that it was hard. We know its hard!

Anyway my thanks to Ryan, Bruce Alpert, Jan Van Dijk, Andrew Sadler, Danielle and the rest of the team for a well worth will 3 days. Enjoy Munich!